10741
Floats Are Weird
Compute this limit more accurately with one weird trick!
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,208 posts.
10742
"Rabbit Test" Unwins the Hugo
I cannot convey the supreme depths to which I’d rather be doing anything else with my Saturday afternoon other than writing this blog post, but here we are. If you have been blessedly insulat…
10743
Serving a website from a Git repo without cloning it
It's fairly common to use git repositories as a vehicle for serving websites. The webdev pushes their changes to some branch of a publicly available git repository, and some web server somewhere serves the current tip of that branch as the website. Github Pages would be the most famous example of this.
10744
Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…
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10746
The AI bullshit singularity
I’m sure we are all familiar with the idea of a technological singularity. Humans create an AI that is smart enough to create an even smarter successor. That successor then creates an even sm…
10747
Airline Takes Revenge After Bad Review, Posts Passenger's Passport Online
YouTuber Josh Cahill, who has nearly 700,000 subscribers, reviews flights and courts drama, it seems. Just a couple of months ago he was banned by Qatar Airways over a negative review. Now he’s taken on East Timor’s Aero Dili.
10748
A small Rust binary indeed (2022)
Can we make a Rust program that's as small as it's assembler equivalent?
10749
I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers (2021)
Several years ago I had the chance to lead two seminars with a group of high-performing Chinese high school seniors. Each seminar had between 20-35 kids; each of these students was a graduating sen…
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10751
A beginner's guide to making beautiful slides for talks
I love designing slides for my talks, so here are some of my not-so-secret secrets and three beginner-friendly steps for how you can up your slides game.
10752
Game Font Forensics
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
10753
An accessible one-handed keyboard, inspired by FrogPad
A couple of years ago, I was in an incident that reduced the strength in my left shoulder. I’ve been waiting for an operation to restore the function to that shoulder, but we were warned the post-operative recovery period would be several months. So I started looking for keyboard options...
10754
Programming book authors: put all the code in the book
tl;dr: programming book authors: put all the code in the book! An extreme antipattern for a programming book is “download the author’s idiosyncratic library code from some random URL an…
10755
Zed Editor: All Occurrences Search from 1s to 4ms
So zero-cost abstractions exist?
10756
Wddbfs – Mount a SQLite database as a filesystem
Often when I’m prototyping a project, I hesitate to use a sqlite database despite their many adavantages . It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records. Part of this is avoiding the overhead of figuring out a…
10757
Pimp Your Board Games
Board gaming is such a lovely hobby to keep your mind and your company on edge. No bright blue …
10758
Python datetime pitfalls, and what libraries are (not) doing about it
It’s no secret that the Python datetime library has its quirks. Not only are there probably more than you think; third-party libraries don’t address most of them! I created a new library to explore what a better datetime library could look like.
10759
10760
Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest
A proposal to end exclusionary zoning would allow for 100,000 more homes in Berkeley's neighborhoods.
10761
Representation Engineering: Mistral-7B on Acid
Playing around with the Representation Engineering paper, I made some interesting control vectors, and a Python package to make your own.
10762
Altman's Ambition
Sam Altman is not playing around.
10763
10764
Releasing my tools under the MIT License was probably a mistake (2023)
For basically as long as I can remember, I have been a staunch defender of permissive licenses over the more copyleft variety. I want you to use things I've written. On top of that I don't believe it's my place to force you to then open source things you have written that expand upon my source code. Hence my extensive…
10765
Headphone and Amp Impedance (2011)
INTRO: The output Impedance of headphone sources is one of the most common reasons the same headphones can sound different depending on wha...
10766
I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind
Why I worry about the effect GitHub Copilot is having and will continue to have on the accessibility of the web at scale.
10767
So long, and thanks for all the bytes
Goodbye Tech, Hello Future
10768
The game theory of seduction and marriage with Jane Austen
The enduring success of her early 19th century novels are in large part due to their persistent relevance
10769
Considerations for a long-running Raspberry Pi
Keeping a Raspberry Pi online and working with zero intervention for weeks, months, or years is somewhat of an art form. Several classes of things can go wrong, and you need to consider how your Pi will recover from each of them.
10770
Options for genuine ECC RAM on the desktop in (early) 2024
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…